ALDORA’s final data for 2025 show that at the close of the year, the most successful brands and franchises are the ones that have successfully established themselves across different channels for interaction and engagement with audiences. In December 2025, franchises competed for holiday attention as gifting cycles, increased downtime, and shared viewing converged. The winners weren’t simply those with the best content, merchandise, or social presence—they were the ones operating as full-scale ecosystems.
About this month’s leaderboard: January’s rankings are based on December data and focus on trending franchises, or those exhibiting the greatest positive month-over-month rank change relative to the prior period.
Leaderboard Terms:
ALDORA Score: A normalized monthly score (0–100) that ranks franchises based on aggregated performance across five behavioral dimensions: Play, Watch, Connect, Create, and Spend.
Momentum Index: A composite measure of net rank movement across the same five behavioral dimensions, capturing overall directional momentum rather than isolated changes within any single category.
With a third film surpassing a $1B box office, it’s no surprise that Avatar (#1) leads this month’s rankings. Receiving an ALDORA Score of 90 and a Momentum Index of 240, not only did Avatar generate a massive global reach in December, but it also accelerated engagement across gaming, video, social, and commerce.
LEGO (#2) follows with an ALDORA Score of 81.7 and a Momentum Index of 171, reinforcing its position as one of the world’s top franchises and cultural touchstones, spanning physical play, user-generated creation, licensed games, and global media presence.
Following the theatrical release of its sequel, Five Nights at Freddy’s (#3) posts an 87.7 ALDORA Score and 167 Momentum Index, demonstrating how creator-driven fandoms and transmedia storytelling can rival the scale of traditional entertainment giants.
Together, the top three illustrate a broader structural shift: franchises that orchestrate interaction across films, games, merchandise, creator platforms, and social ecosystems compound faster and more durably than those competing solely for passive or single-format attention. It’s one thing to attract audiences, and another to effectively activate them.
Additionally, persistent, community-driven platforms like Destiny (89.4 score), No Man’s Sky (83.3), Dungeons & Dragons (91.7), and emerging live-service contenders like REMATCH (81.8) demonstrate resilient engagement. Meanwhile, revitalized legacy franchises, including Assassin’s Creed (83.5), Tomb Raider (79.9), Silent Hill (77.3), Metro (76.7), and Armored Core (61.9), which reflects renewed momentum in Bandai Namco’s legacy franchise strategy, benefit from IP refreshes but remain driven by release peaks instead of consistent activity. It’s enough to place them on this month’s leaderboard, but without a transmedia ecosystem, will they sustain meaningful momentum?
One unconventional outlier stands out. At #8, Tesla (81.1 ALDORA Score, 110 Momentum Index) sits firmly in the middle of this month’s Top & Tilted contenders. Its presence underscores how brand platforms increasingly behave like cultural ecosystems—blending identity, community participation, merchandising, and social amplification to generate persistent engagement. Even as Tesla’s Q4 2025 vehicle deliveries came in below consensus expectations, its cultural relevance remains robust through social buzz and online engagement. Tesla’s sustained attention through social discourse and online activity shows that today’s cultural relevance is driven as much by participation and visibility as by product performance.
This month’s top franchises turn attention into participation across screens, platforms, and products. The holiday window magnifies this advantage, accelerating discovery, onboarding, and cross-format migration. But the real winners don’t rely on seasonal spikes. They build enduring cultural gravity.
ALDORA tracks brand performance across five dimensions of the gaming ecosystem—Play (direct gameplay), Watch (streaming and video content), Connect (social interactions), Create (user-generated content), and Spend (in-game purchases and merchandise)—aggregating these diverse engagement signals into a unified measure of audience reach.
The top of January’s leaderboard is populated by franchises that operate as integrated participation platforms rather than isolated entertainment products. Avatar (#1, 90 ALDORA Score, 240 Momentum), LEGO (#2, 81.7 Score, 171 Momentum), and Five Nights at Freddy’s (#3, 87.7 Score, 167 Momentum) all activate and engage audiences across film, gameplay, physical products, creator ecosystems, and social engagement.
These leaders are distinguished by their velocity. Their elevated Momentum Index reflects magnifying behavior: fans migrate between formats, participate through creation, play, and community that sustains even between major releases. The implication is structural. Cultural power is increasingly determined by how well a franchise organizes participation across surfaces, rather than how successfully it launches a single product.
Beyond the top three, participation-driven worlds continue to demonstrate durable engagement profiles. Destiny (89.4), No Man’s Sky (83.3), Dungeons & Dragons (91.7), and emerging live-service contenders like REMATCH (81.8) maintain strong scores because they are built around continuous interaction, community identity, and long-tail content cycles.
These platforms benefit more from retained behavior loops than from seasonal volatility: live updates, social coordination, creator ecosystems, and sustained player investment drive ongoing engagement beyond individual release windows. Their Momentum Index performance suggests steadier engagement patterns rather than purely launch-driven spikes.
By contrast, revitalized legacy franchises, including Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, Metro, Armored Core, and Dune, gain from refreshed IP cycles but remain more closely tied to release peaks than to sustained ecosystem momentum. They generate meaningful bursts of attention, but their growth capacity remains structurally constrained without deeper participation layers.
The presence of Tesla (#8, 81.1 Score, 110 Momentum) among this month’s leaders reminds us how cultural platforms are no longer confined to traditional media categories. Tesla’s engagement profile reflects many of the same dynamics as top franchises: identity signaling, community participation, merchandise demand, creator amplification, and persistent social visibility. Even amid softening sales momentum, Tesla sustains cultural relevance through ongoing discourse and network effects rather than product cadence alone.
This convergence articulates a broader competitive reality: brands, IP owners, and platforms are now competing on their ability to sustain participatory ecosystems, not simply on product output.
The January leaderboard illustrates the critical gap between franchises optimized for participation and those optimized for distribution. Production scale, marketing reach, or platform access alone don’t define success. Instead, the franchises on top are those that effectively connect play, viewing, creation, commerce, and community into a cohesive behavioral loop.
Avatar, LEGO, and Five Nights at Freddy’s exemplify this. Their performance reflects not just popularity, but systemic design: multiple entry points, cross-format reinforcement, and durable fan investment that intensifies over time.
As more franchises pursue transmedia expansion, execution becomes the true differentiator. Owning IP is no longer enough. The winners will be the organizations that can design, operate, and sustain ecosystems that consistently convert attention into participation—and participation into lasting cultural power.
Eager for next month’s leaderboard? Follow ALDORA on LinkedIn to be the first to see where culture, capital, and consumer power collide next.
Analysis by ALDORA CEO Joost van Dreunen
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